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Music for Pleasure

You have not heard Jeff Buckley's version of "Hallelujah" until you've cranked it on Music for Pleasure's $30,000 system. Holy crap! It's as though the late crooner is not only alive and in the room but inside your head, channeling Leonard Cohen lyrics into your ear from the backside. You not only hear Jeff Buckley breathe again, but he possesses you. When he stretches to hit the perfect note, the sound doesn't bend, doesn't fall an iota short of delivering: We're talking pulsating viscera, right there, emanating from speakers. The system -- a Krell amplifier, T+A components and Dynaudio speakers -- is a sturdy mahogany chapel within which the music resides. In much the same fashion, Music for Pleasure itself is a chapel to sound. The high-end retailer occupies a former Webster Groves residence at the corner of Shrewsbury Avenue and Big Bend Boulevard. They sell way-way high-end gear for men (face it, audiophilia is a uniquely male endeavor) with fat wallets and hungry ears. Cheap stuff here will set you back, like, a grand. You wanna go top-end? Try 50 times that. It's pretty cool inside, less a retail shop than a home with the Most Supremest Rockingest Kick-Assingest Sound Systems Ever. The individual rooms are intact, and within each MfP audio experts have constructed perfect ambient atmospheres. Sit on the couch and a gale-force wind blasts music through your body. "Hallelujah."